Voucher proponents, after decades of trying, may finally have a path forward. With the start of the latest special session, House Speaker Dade Phelan suggested a compromise was in the works.
Texans should be wary. While compromise has a central role in politics, the bipartisan coalition that has blocked vouchers for decades shouldn’t stop now.
The Texas House has been the thorn in the Senate’s side when it comes to educational savings accounts that allow families to use taxpayer dollars for private school tuition. But on Monday, Phelan told the Chronicle he’s been talking with both rural Republicans, representing areas where public schools are the heart of the community and among the major employers, and Democrats who together have traditionally formed a firewall against vouchers.
“I do feel like we can come to terms. It’s going to take not just a path forward on school choice, but on school funding,” Phelan said. “The truth of the matter is that we’re going to have both, we have to have both, and we’re in discussions with the governor’s office on that.”
In other words, though Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s ploy of tethering teacher raises and school district allotments to a voucher plan failed in the general legislative session earlier this year, it may work now in the special session Gov. Greg Abbott called.
The details of a possible deal haven’t emerged yet. The initial special session call only mentioned vouchers, not publicschool funding, but Republican Sen. Brandon Creighton has put forward a bill that includes a $75 increase in the per student allotment. That doesn’t augment public school funding anywhere close to the roughly $900 per student needed to keep up with inflation. He’s also behind the proposal to offer $8,000 to students leaving public schools to enroll in private ones. The cost? Five hundred million for just the first two years alone, according to the bill’s fiscal note. It’s a bad deal.
We’ve seen bad voucher bills before. Many times.
In the 1950s, it took six state senators and 36 hours of filibustering to derail efforts to give private school tuition grants to families looking to opt out of racial integration.
By the 1990s, it took a compromise on charter schools, at first allowing just 20 charter schools in a sort of pilot program meant to test their success. Bankrolled by deep-pocketed conservative donors, including James R. Leininger and others, governors from George W. Bushto Rick Perry and now Greg Abbott have tried to add vouchers to their legacies. Between 1995 and 2015, at least 54 bills tried to advance vouchers in one form or another, according to a search by the Austin American- Statesman.
Proponents never stopped trying. This year, Abbott vetoed dozens of unrelated bills in retaliation after lawmakers failed to deliver vouchers in the regular session.
He could call special session after special session –and has vowed to do just that–until it gets done. He’s threatened Republican lawmakers who don’t support vouchers with primary election challenges.
Is this what it takes? Intra- party warfare to push through a policy that almost certainly won’t help the most desperate families and will instead force the state to prop up two education systems: one underfunded yet forever chasing rising standards at the threat of takeover and another profiting from public dollars with no accountability.
Why the urgency now? There’s no new research suddenly affirming widescale voucher schemes. No, instead, it seems the grip of deep-pocketed, far-right donors is growing ever tighter.
It’s true vouchers have not been uniformly a conservative issue. It was a Black, Democratic Houston-area lawmaker state Rep. Ron Wilson– often at odds with his party–who introduced a voucher bill in 1993 that would’ve granted vouchers to disadvantaged students to give those kids, as he said, a “fighting chance.” And that’s how some Republican leaders sold the idea as well. Bush, for example, wanted a voucher program that would aid students at low-performing schools.
But critics saw through it. Cecile Richards, daughter of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards and founder of the Texas Freedom Network, called it a “billion-dollar experiment local taxpayers can’t afford.” And Sylvester Turner, then a state representative and now Houston mayor, insisted that even the efforts to target voucher programs at disadvantaged populations were a Trojan Horse.
“When people want something, they don’t mind using minorities and the poor to open the door for programs they want,” he said.
And on and on it went. With hundreds of thousands of students in charter schools across the state, isn’t that enough choice?
“I firmly believe that one of the reasons vouchers are still being discussed is the student body in charter schools is just as diverse in race, religion, ability, and economics as the ISDs from which these parents are trying to remove their children,” Thomas Ratliff, who served as vice chairman of the Texas State Board of Education, wrote recently. The Republican continued, “The question now is whether the Texas Legislature in 2023 will vote to move back toward segregation. Even in 1957, Texas lawmakers knew better than to do that.”Do they still?
As we’ve written, research suggests vouchers don’t yield academic gains, the amount offered generally tends to help middle-class families, and even a high-ranking official with the Texas Education Agency has admitted that vouchers could cost public schools.
We believe in choice. Texans already have choice. We’ve made the compromises.
Vouchers shouldn’t be one of them. There simply isn’t a way to funnel taxpayer money to private schools–even with a paltry boost to per-student public school funding– without further jeopardizing our longterm ability to support a thriving public school system.
